What I Found When I Searched for My Long-Lost Sister

I had her year and city of birth: 1976, Cebu City, Philippines.

I had her first name: Mara, meaning bitter, as I alluded to it in my first book.

And I knew our mother’s maiden name, which would have been on her birth certificate.

These details were enough to start a search for my long-lost sister—the hours-old baby given up by our mother four decades ago—a search I so confidently, perhaps even in a blasé way, promised to chronicle. It was I who pitched the idea to my editor. I will find my sister, I said. I’ll write about the search in an essay.

I thought I knew what I was capable of. I had done journalistic work and written two nonfiction books. I had also been creating content for an international NGO, dispatching relevant information from the frontlines. I had worked as a research coordinator and a fact-checker. And before then, as a lawyer’s assistant. I’d had preparation. I knew how to find data, facts, people.

I thought.

*

The information—that’s what I called my sister for a while—first came to me in 2010. My father sat me down for what I thought was a sendoff into marriage. It was the week of my wedding and I was prime for bursting, but I held it in as he told me about my sister.

Okay, I said, what do you want me to do with this information?

Papa said it was just time for me to know. No need to reach out to her. He didn’t know where she was or how to contact her, anyway. But the information was now in my hands: My mother had another baby girl, born a full decade before me. She wasn’t Papa’s child, but our mother’s med-school boyfriend’s, and she likely still lived where Mama left her.

Or Australia, Papa said. That detail, too, he so casually laid before me. But again, I took it without fretting or fussing, at least not outwardly.

I got married and had a baby. I stashed the information away.

I thought I knew what I was capable of. I had done journalistic work and written two books. I knew how to find data, facts, people. I thought.

I didn’t think of it again until I had to think of it: when my daughter grew to be a preschooler and wanted to learn our family tree. Coincidentally, it was also when my body started to resemble my mother’s—high hips, low waist, full bosom. I wondered if my sister looked anything like us.

Sometimes, early in the morning or late at night, her name would come to mind and feelings of jealousy would rush in. I’d feel possessive of Mama, wanting to be her only girl. But immediately after, I’d feel guilty for knowing our mother at all. I was the lucky one, I’d begin to think. Lucky to have known our mother’s name, mannerisms, voice, face.

Then I’d start to remember how unlucky I might have actually been, to not have been spared our mother’s recklessness and ire, her politics and criminal acts that fed off her mental illness—the very things that pushed me to become estranged from her. I have not seen my mother in seventeen years, not since I was adopted by a relative when I was sixteen.

In a beat, again, I’d feel pity for that other child, that other daughter—motherless, lost. Mama never brushed her hair, never flipped through issues of Vogue with her, never told her she was pretty. She was given away like Mama used to give away my outgrown pairs of shoes.

How sad, but for whom? For Mama? For that baby born in 1976? Or was it sad that I wasn’t given away sooner, before I was relinquished for adoption in 2003? Would I have been better off if I were placed in some other caregiver’s arms back in 1986?

These cycles of mental and emotional acrobatics would come and go, leaving me inattentive at dinner or poker-faced at meetings. Once, I took my daughter to see a Christmas movie and left the theatre with no recollection of the movie’s plot. For ninety minutes, I thought of how this other daughter had never seen a movie with our mother. As we were leaving the theatre, my daughter asked, What was your favorite part?

Uh, I said.

You’re not really with me in the movie, Mom, she said.

Who has abandoned whom?

*

The decade mark of holding (in) the information was fast approaching. I began planning our ten-year anniversary trip to London and Spain. I started throwing the idea around, to my husband, our siblings, his parents, our close friends. How romantic to renew our vows in Europe, I thought. I asked my husband if it was time I invited my long-lost sister to something. I’ve always had a knack for event planning. It could be fun.

For whom? he said. And it would be helpful to find her first.

I laughed. Is that a challenge?

How sad, but for whom? For Mama? For that baby born in 1976? Or was it sad that I wasn’t given away sooner?

To fast-track the process, I turned it into an assignment and tacked a deadline onto it. In February, I emailed an editor who had just released a book about finding her sister. She accepted my pitch and said I could—should—take it easy. She didn’t give me a deadline, knowing full well how emotional or meandering or frustrating or pointless the search could be.

Nonsense, I thought. This wasn’t my first investigative rodeo. If I could research my way back into my parents’ and my childhoods, find my fugitive stepfather, and write two books with what I’d found, I can research my way back to my mother’s first pregnancy. I can find my sister.

I resolved to have something written and published by the following October, in time for the release of my new book. Eight months would be plenty of time. I made a schedule: first two months for internet and database searches, next two months for DNA test kits and ancestry tracking, the third phase for cold calls to hospitals and city clerks, and the last two months for making the call or writing the letter that would announce my existence to my sister.

The official search started as planned. I scoured the web using free options, including a help-line for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a source I had consulted for a prior project about my late but not beloved stepfather. When this led to nothing, I remained hopeful. I entered my credit card number into a pop-up form on a genealogy database website. Two hundred dollars later, nothing. So I spat into a vial, sealed it, and sent my DNA sample across the country. There went another hundred dollars. I signed up for weekly “You have new family members!” reports. I waited.

On the eve of my thirty-third birthday, I received an email containing information about my ancestry composition: 94.7 percent Filipino and Austronesian, 0.6 percent Chinese, 0.5 percent Southeast Asian, 0.4 percent Native American, 0.3 percent Siberian, 0.5 percent Broadly East Asian, 0.5 percent South Asian, 0.2 percent Sub-Saharan African, 0.1 percent Ghanaian, Liberian, and Sierra Leonean, 0.1 percent Unassigned. I noted zero matches with Spanish or Iberian DNA; my mother’s pride relied on her having descended from a colonizing governor, a European. What a liar, I thought of her, for the thousandth time. But I quickly forgot this part of the report when I saw the tab labeled “DNA Relatives.” I held my breath.

You do it, I told my husband.

He shook his head. Let’s look together.

Two clicks and a password: 1,053 DNA relatives.

I only needed one.

According to the report, my closest relative on file was a second cousin in Cupertino, California. I always thought Cupertino was an imaginary city—a placeholder for my iPhone weather app. Was this what all these searches were about? When the unreal, or what you thought was unreal, becomes the truth? But wait—second cousin? This was not the information I was looking for. This was not the truth I wanted.

I am capable of finding people, I reminded myself. Detour, detour, detour.

Was this what all these searches were about? When the unreal, or what you thought was unreal, becomes the truth? 

Papa visited us at the end of the week in Charleston, South Carolina, where my husband and I had been living since our daughter was born. Papa hadn’t come to see us in three years, so I felt obligated to give him a grand tour: historic downtown, the beach, and his favorite, a restaurant overlooking the water. But I was on a mission, too. I needed more on the information.

His third day with us, I took him shopping on King Street, where it was sunny and peopled and there was plenty to look at. I could ask casually, just as he first presented the information to me casually nearly a decade ago. He could answer while distracted. This was a tactic I’d used during other interviews.

Happy with a discount on his purchase, he strutted out a store with two bags in hand. I had two for myself, too. Walking with our haul to an ice cream shop, I said, Papa, remember when you told me I had a sister? What else do you know about her?

Nothing, he said, looking at an ice cream menu and ordering two scoops of the chocolate.

Nothing? Nothing! I said, while shaking my head at the ice cream shop worker who asked whether I was ordering, too. I told Papa he did not have the right to withhold information when the information was initially so haphazardly given away.

I am not withholding information, he said, licking the side of his cone.

Oh, but you knew that she somehow could be in Australia? What was that about?

Like a child, I stomped out of the ice cream shop, griping about how I needed a last name for the baby’s biological father. I needed her birth month, at least.

The Australia part was hearsay amongst Mama’s sisters and hairdresser, he said, catching up with me. He had tried to send money to the baby, but he couldn’t remember how he tried to—that was decades ago, in a different era, a different time zone, a different marriage. He said he didn’t remember much anymore.

Why did you tell me at all? I asked.

He wrapped one arm around me and said, That information is another part of your mother you can have.

*

Mama used to drive our van off-road, with me in it, a few times crashing into fences or mile markers. It is why I don’t drive today. She also pretended to have cancer so I would send her money while I was in college. Of all her sins, these might be the slightest.

Of her four babies—that I know of—one was given away at birth, one died shortly after birth, another grew into adulthood but not without the interruptions of drug overdoses and failed suicide attempts. Of these four, I was to know her the longest. I lived with her until I was twelve and we communicated until I was in college, though I did not permit myself to see her.

When I learned in my early twenties that I was to have a little girl of my own, I made the definitive choice to cut ties. It ends here, I said. Detour, detour, detour.

*

When my father left South Carolina, I abandoned my search. I let the idea of the essay flail around in my head, but only so I would feel guilty for not having accomplished my task. This overly penitent, self-destructive habit was an extension of my having cared for—parented—my mother. My childhood ingrained in me a belief that I was responsible for everything, including cleaning up Mama’s messes, apologizing on her behalf, and explaining her intentions and actions.

I thought I was capable of finding my sister, but all my search amounted to was credit card debt for the genealogy and DNA services, index cards filled with useless material, a legal pad of scribbles, and printouts of articles about life in the Philippines in and around 1976.

My childhood ingrained in me a belief that I was responsible for everything, including cleaning up Mama’s messes.

The dining table was covered in papers and we hadn’t been able to eat there for weeks—a sign that usually meant a book or an essay was in the works. Now it was time to abandon the project and admit that I had failed. I was not the good journalist I thought I was. I was just another daughter with a mother who had secrets. I began to pack away the index cards and legal pad, swiping them into the Staples paper crate I stored “Ideas for Projects” in. I picked up the loose printouts, tempted to trash them altogether. But something in me wanted to give them another close read.

I read about the heyday of disco in the Philippines—a time my mother spoke so fondly of, sober or not. She loved her disco days so much, she had a disco built inside our house, mirror ball and velvet curtains and shiny square tiles and all. I still know the words to her favorite ABBA, Gloria Gaynor, Chic, Bee Gees, and Earth, Wind & Fire songs because she played them repeatedly in our in-home disco.

Those were the days, Mama always said.

I kept reading the printouts closely: articles and essays about high society life, disco fever, and Martial Law in the Philippines. My mother’s world at the time of her first pregnancy, if the literature stands accurate, was the world of a true doyenne—a habitué of sparkly, smoky underground discotheques set inside post-Spanish mini-mansions, stages for Asia’s richest of the rich. But it was also the dictatorship, so the youth—which my mother was a part of then—was subject to curfews and rules they could forget at the disco. I imagined my mother in the same Chinoiserie and V-necks cut down to the navel that the women in the photos wore. Earrings as big as bangles. Bangs, bangs, bangs.

I walked to my closet and hung a now-too-small deep-V dress from my shoulders. I looked in the mirror, and clearly, the past had translated into the present—in the form of taste. I am my mother’s daughter. Vogue, deep Vs, big earrings, big bangles, bangs, bangs, bangs.

Forgetting that I was in the process of clearing the table, of abandoning the project, I kept reading. I called out to Alexa and had her play “’70s music” on Pandora to set the mood. If music gets actors into method acting, music gets me into method writing. Immersed in the groove and soothe of my mother’s songs, I began to read out loud passages about the ’70s. I read them while swaying and walking to the fridge for a glass of wine. Next thing I knew, I was singing “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. I was Mama now: high hips, low waist, full bosom, talking to the air.

Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” came on. I read more. Then I read them all out loud again, awash in words that portrayed my mother’s early years—before me, before my brothers, before the baby girl she gave away.

If you leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me.

Images of Mama in her she-bang swirled in my head with the wine I was drinking. I felt her with me there. Or at least I felt what it was like to be her.

Oooh, girl. Baby, please don’t go.

The music, the role-playing it ushered, the photos. All of it made me cry.

*

Weeks later, on a work date with my husband at a café, he asked how the project was going.

Not going, I said, frantically typing. It’s over. I’ll have to tell the editor.

He reached his hand across the table to touch my wrist. What did you find? he asked.

At first, I ignored him and kept typing. Work is easier than the truth. But then, what if the truth is your work? Unable to keep it in, I let out a big breath before saying, I found nothing.

Then I said, But I also found empathy for my mother.

I told him about the night I was clearing the table and got to reading and dancing. I told him that in the thick of song and dance and words, a vision of my mother came to me. She was young. Her hair was parted in the middle, aligned with the deep cut of her silver romper’s neckline, which drew down to a pooch. She would have been on her way to medical school, if the clothes dated the vision right. And the pooch would have been my sister—a roadblock to her becoming a doctor. It was Martial Law and my mother was a politician’s daughter, as well as a daughter of a Catholic militia-heavy republic. What was a girl to do?

I found nothing. But I also found empathy for my mother.

From there, I told my husband that Mama likely chose to continue her studies south of where her family was, in Cebu City, so she could hide the pregnancy. With the Philippine academic calendar determined by trimesters, her school year would have been enough time to gestate to full term, arrange for an adoption, and give birth.

Bye, first baby. Hello, lifetime of saying bye to children.

I told my husband, as I was crying in public now, that I once thought I was capable of finding anything, anyone. But I never thought I’d be capable of feeling for and with my mother, seeing her world through her eyes, perhaps inching close to something like forgiveness. I thought I was a good journalist, and maybe I still am. I never thought, not in the twenty years I’d filled with degrees and research and jobs, that I’d be, for what it’s worth, any semblance of a good daughter.

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